What I Did in the Hospital Bathroom During My Labor

A few months ago, a friend who works as a physical therapist and midwife told me something I never would have thought of. Her name is Elena, and one afternoon, over coffee, she explained that many pregnant women turn to masturbation during contractions to make the pain more bearable and, with the orgasm, help labor move along.

At first I laughed. I thought about who the hell could possibly think of cumming in the middle of pain I imagined to be terrible, split in two on a gurney. But Elena spoke with the confidence of someone who has seen hundreds of births go by, and the idea stuck in me like a splinter.

Throughout the entire pregnancy I had used an oil she herself recommended to me. Marcos gave me massages in the perineum area twice a day to increase elasticity and avoid tearing. It started out as a clinical formality, almost medical, but it ended up being something else. His fingers learned my body in a new way, and more than one night the massage ended with me biting the pillow.

I had always been the kind of woman who wasn’t afraid of her own desire. Before I got pregnant, I had tried things Marcos couldn’t even imagine, and I kept in some drawer of memory experiences that still made my skin prickle if I let them out. I thought pregnancy would shut all that down, but it was the opposite: I never felt so sensitive, so on edge, so willing.

So when I read dozens of testimonials online from women who swore they’d cum alive between contractions, I stopped laughing. I’m curious, and I’ve always been too horny for my own good. I decided I wasn’t going to miss that experience.

When packing my hospital bag, I slipped a metallic pink bullet vibrator into my toiletry bag, between the toothbrush and the hand cream, small and discreet.

—Are you crazy? —Marcos said when I told him—. What if the midwife comes in to see how you’re doing and finds you in there getting yourself off?

—If she’s even half-informed, she’ll know the method and respect it —I replied—. I’ve never read about a laboring woman being arrested for masturbating.

He shook his head, half scandalized, half resigned. He knew me well enough to know that once I set my mind on something, nobody could stop me.

***

The day came on a dawn in late March. The first contractions woke me like a fist closing up inside me, each one closer together, deeper. I ignored Marcos, who wanted to race to the hospital, and I listened to Elena: since I still hadn’t lost my mucus plug, I filled the bathtub with hot water and sank in.

The water helped. Between wave after wave of pain, I floated with my eyes closed, breathing the way they’d taught me in the childbirth class. But when the house started to feel too small, I grabbed the bag and we left.

They settled me into the room where I would also spend the days after the birth. They only left me a Pilates ball, and I sat on it for a good while, rocking back and forth, dying of pain with every contraction. Marcos held my hand and wiped the sweat from my forehead with a towel.

Until I decided the time for action had come.

I got up, went over to the bag, and fished out my toiletry case. Marcos started muttering protests under his breath, that I had some ideas, that I was going to catch an infection, that this wasn’t a movie.

—I’m going to the bathroom —I told him—. I’ll leave the door ajar in case I get dizzy. If someone from the staff comes by, tell them I’m peeing. I can’t stand this pain, and if the orgasm relieves it, what do I have to lose?

I gave him a long kiss, tongue and all, holding the back of his neck, and locked myself in.

The first thing was to prop my phone on the vanity, on top of the toiletry case, framing the entire toilet. I wanted to have the whole memory. I set the recording with a ten-second delay, sat on the bowl as comfortably as I could, and took out the bullet.

Since my phone was recording, I couldn’t put on any video to help get me going, so I closed my eyes and searched my memory. I reached for a very specific memory, from the years before Marcos, when I was a much wilder woman.

***

It happened during a vacation, at a friend’s grandfather’s house. She was out at an academy almost all day, and I stayed alone in that big old house with Don Aurelio, an old man with a broad back and huge hands who still kept something of the man he must have been when he was young.

One morning he came out of the shower thinking nobody was home. I saw him cross the hallway with the towel half tied around him, and I saw him, all of him. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

—You’re well endowed, aren’t you —I blurted out, shameless.

The old man was stunned, but his body reacted before his pride did, and it rose right there, slowly, like a mast. I was in that crazy phase when danger turned me on more than it scared me. I pulled my breasts out without him asking.

He motioned toward his bedroom. There he sucked my nipples with an eagerness I hadn’t expected from a man his age, while I jerked him off slowly, feeling his thickness in my palm. Then I sat on top of him astride and fucked him myself, setting the pace, until he came inside me. After that he lowered his head between my legs and cleaned everything off with his tongue, and he drove me to one of the best orgasms of my life.

We saw each other a couple more times, always midmorning, always with the house in silence. I asked him for money, half joking, half serious, and he gave it to me without a word of complaint, always more than I expected. There was something about that exchange, about that older man paying for me as if I were an impossible whim, that turned me on in a way I didn’t know how to name then. The last time he opened my ass slowly, patiently, while stroking me with one finger in front, and it was something I still remember with a shiver down my neck.

***

Sitting on that hospital toilet, my belly huge and a new contraction tightening my back, I slid the bullet over my swollen clit and went back to that room, to those hands.

I imagined I was going to visit him at the retirement home where I know he lives now, dressed as a nurse, that I closed the door, that I took off my gown and pulled down his pajama pants to check whether that man still responded the way he had then. The fantasy was as absurd as it was arousing, and that was exactly what I needed.

The vibrator buzzed against my clit in tight circles, the same ones his fingers had drawn years before. My body, so tense from labor, found another kind of tension, one it knew well and knew where it was headed.

I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t moan too loudly. The room was on the other side of the door, the whole hospital breathing out there, and that only made me hotter. I thought of Don Aurelio coming in from behind, of his hot mouth, of the weight of his body, and I let the image take me there.

I came with a long shudder that ran from my thighs to my chest, biting my lip until it hurt. And Elena was right: during those seconds, the pain of the contractions disappeared completely, dissolved into something else, much older and more mine.

But the orgasm also set everything else loose. I felt a warm gush between my legs and realized my waters had just broken. A brutal contraction bent me in half. I stopped the phone as best I could, turned it off with trembling fingers, and shouted for help.

—Marcos! It’s happening, it’s happening!

He came in pale, half scared and half proud that I had gotten my way. As he helped me stand, I whispered in his ear:

—You’ll see the video when we get home.

***

I gave birth without an epidural, pretty fast, as if that orgasm had given my body permission to open. My milk came in that very same night, and when I finally had my daughter on my chest, I felt that all that boldness had been, in addition to pleasure, a way of not surrendering to fear.

We’ve been home for a few days now. I’ve got plenty of milk, and when the baby is satisfied and falls asleep, I let Marcos empty out whatever’s left. He loves it. Sometimes after that he runs the tip of his cock over my wet nipples and gets insanely hard, and I, even though the postpartum quarantine still forbids it, enjoy watching him lose his mind.

I’m waiting to stop bleeding so I can get back to normal. But before that, without anyone knowing, I want to try the big vibrator on my own, well coated with lubricant, to check how everything downstairs has healed after the battle.

Marcos already watched the video on the computer. He looks at it again and again, and while he freaks out over his wife’s shamelessness, he masturbates nonstop. He says it’s the hottest thing he’s ever seen. And I, who know the full story that was running through my head that night, smile and keep it to myself.